How The Toronto Star missed Chris Spence's Pythagorean connection

E-books are supposed to be the future of book publishing. Unfortunately, they also sometimes serve as a dumping grounds for dubious tripe that would never make it into a properly edited newspaper article.

Consider, for instance, the new, hastily produced Toronto Star Dispatches title Chris Spence: How Plagiarism Caught Up With Toronto’s Top Educator. Mr. Spence, as many will know, is the former Director of Education for the Toronto District School Board. He resigned on Jan. 10, after the National Post and others uncovered numerous instances of plagiarism in his Phd. dissertation, his blog and his published journalism.

There have been plenty of plagiarism scandals, but I have never seen one quite like this. The plagiarism is so extensive and shameless that it invites pity — for it suggests some kind of odd mania or personality disorder, or perhaps even a symptom of Mr. Spence getting bonked on the head one too many times during his football career. If anyone produced an e-book probing this aspect of Mr. Spence’s fall from grace, I would gladly read it.

This isn’t that e-book: Author Louise Brown offers a lot of sad and touching comments from the many educators and students who were positively affected by Spence during his career. But it’s all superficial (as, to be fair, all of these hastily gummed together e-books are). There is nothing in the way of substantive psychoanalysis.

Brown also has seen fit to include something quite appalling: In a sort of parody of militant late-1980s/early-’90s-vintage political correctness, one of the teachers interviewed even saw fit to play the race card.

“With his grizzled grey beard and natty dreads, Grade 8 math teacher Ishaka Williams has known Chris Spence the longest of all 10 men gathered at CW Jefferys [high school] this Saturday morning,” the e-book informs us. “Don’t call him ‘Mr.;’ he uses ‘Ras,’ an Ethiopian title used by Rastafarians. And don’t even think about talking to him about plagiarism because he says much of European recorded history — including the so-called Pythagorean Theorem he introduced to his class this week at Brookview Middle School — was plagiarized by Greek scholars from African science and thought.”

Wow. Really? Spence isn’t a criminal. But imagine if some loon being interviewed about Bernie Madoff declared: “And don’t even think about talking to him about white-collar crime, because he says much of European wealth was stolen from Jews during the pogroms of the Middle Ages.”

I suppose it was interesting for the Star to include that little nugget, as evidence of some of the fringe responses to Spence’s plagiarist-outing among the people who admired him. But in a perverse way, it also does a disservice to Spence — who, himself, never tried to play the race card on his own behalf during his fall from power.

To add insult to injury, the quote from Ishaka Williams also inadvertently highlights the worst aspect of Afrocentric educational theories (one of Mr. Spence’s own controversial and unpopular initiatives in Toronto): their dubious relationship with actual history.

For the record, Pythagoras of Samos (570 BC-495 BC) was a versatile philosopher and mathematician who remains famous, among high school students at least, for popularizing a useful theorem stating that the squared length of a hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squared lengths of a right-angled triangle’s two shorter sides. The “Afrocentric” notion that Pythagoras got his ideas from Africans is largely based on the accounts of Cleopatra’s Egyptian priests, who told Diodorus of Sicily that just about every famous Greek writer and thinker — from Homer, to Plato, to Pythagoras — had stolen their ideas from North Africa after personal journeys across the Mediterranean. As classicist Mary Lefkowitz demonstrated in her acclaimed and definitive 1996 book, Not out of Africa, these claims evaporate under real historical scrutiny — which is one of the reasons why Afrocentrism itself is now treated as such a dubious pedagogical approach. Africa has given the world of arts, letters and sciences many gifts. But, pace Ishaka Williams, the Illiad and Pythagorean theorem are not among them.

And yet — to be fair — Mr. Williams is right about one thing: Pythagoras didn’t really invent Pythagorean theorem. A recognizable example of a Pythagorean triple (specifically, 102 = 82 + 62) dates back to Babylonian sources that are about four millennia old. Ancient South and East Asian sources also reveal early knowledge of what, in China, is apparently called Gougu or Shang Gao Theorem.

In other words, Pythagoras came to this game of squares many centuries after it started. And if Chris Spence had been a proud self-identified Babylonian, who promoted Babylocentric educational theories, Ishaka Williams’ complaint might have made a small bit of sense.

But the larger question is: Does all of this make Pythagoras a plagiarist, just like Chris Spence? Was he considered as such during his own era? And did he have to resign from anything as a result?

It’s hard to say: Regrettably, none of the e-books from fifth-century-BC Greece have survived into modern times.